Aboriginals, whites and the clash over caribou. By Tim Querengesser
The caribou Bill Erasmus shot that day was born in Nunavut. It foraged for lichen in the summer before crossing the Barrenlands into the Northwest Territories for the fall, where it took shelter among the trees. Then, in the spring, it began returning to its birthplace on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. It had retraced this oval route each year. But that day in late January, its path crossed an ice-road 110 kilometres north of Yellowknife. Erasmus was there, waiting.
Not long after he dropped the animal, Erasmus – grand chief of the NWT’s Dene Nation – saw a plane droning overhead. He was waiting for that, too. The pilot spotted him, along with other Yellowknives Dene hunting in the area. NWT wildlife officers were alerted, and before long they came driving along the ice road, intercepting Erasmus and the others. “They gave me a piece of paper that said they’d contact me in the future,” Erasmus says. Then the officers confiscated 17 of the caribou the group had killed and drove off.
The hunters were breaking territorial law by harvesting Bathurst caribou in a vast no-harvesting zone – a Switzerland-sized tract of land north of Great Slave Lake that the government had recently deemed off-limits. In killing the caribou, Erasmus pitted his aboriginal hunting rights against this ban. And with the caribou seized, the showdown was now destined for a court trial that, as of press time, had yet to be resolved. “Their actions were not justified,” Erasmus says. “We were out hunting for food. We don’t believe they have authority to prevent us hunting without agreement from us. In other words, we give them authority.”
As Erasmus and dozens of others have shown, when the right to hunt is threatened, aboriginal people defend it tooth and claw. But the NWT isn’t backing down. That’s because last year its caribou survey found the Bathurst herd to be in freefall, having plummeted from 186,000 animals in 2003 to just 32,000 in 2009. When the survival of a caribou herd is threatened, the government is obliged to act.
The bridge between the two sides – hunting rights and wildlife protection – is what’s called a co-management board, a group composed both of aboriginal and government experts. Yet the board for the North Slave region, called the Wek’èezhìi Renewable Resources Board, was struggling to resolve the dispute. Its work creating a management plan for the Bathurst herd was progressing at a pace that lagged miles behind the developing problem. In fact, when the sizable Dene winter cow-hunt was just weeks away, the board had postponed its next meeting for several months.
“Things weren’t moving quickly enough,” says Jan Adamczewski, a longtime biologist with the NWT. Adamczewski was one of many people advising territorial environment minister Michael Miltenberger about what to do next. Eventually, citing a crisis, Miltenberger enacted the ban at the beginning of this year. He then referred the resulting challenge over who has ultimate authority over aboriginal hunting to the territorial Supreme Court. “We wanted to do it through the co-management process. We’re as committed to it as anyone,” Adamczewski says. “But it tends to sometimes work a little bit slowly.”
Ah, co-management. Back in the 1960s, as the political and regulatory machinery of the modern North was being assembled, the goal was aboriginals and non-aboriginals working together. Disagreements would be resolved through dialogue; diktats from on high and defiance from down low – lingering patterns of colonialism – would slowly disappear.
So, 50 years on, how does it work? Well, when times are relatively easy, co-management makes democracy-lovers swoon. But present it with a challenge, where two sides have equally compelling arguments, and “the jury is still out,” says Don Russell, a coordinator with the CircumArctic Rangifer Monitoring & Assessment Network, which tracks caribou populations across the North. During these stalemates, the clock suddenly turns backwards and the resulting government decrees are often met with civil disobedience. If we judge relations between aboriginals and non-aboriginals in the North by their ability to agree and act together, what does the clash over caribou – perhaps the NWT’s biggest clash ever – say about the future of this relationship?
Dogs bark and woodsmoke stings the air in Behchokó˛. Set near the northern tip of Great Slave Lake, the town of 2,000 is the capital of the Tłi˛cho˛ Nation. Out in the empty streets, the day yawns lazily along. But inside the community hall, where the Wek’èezhìi Renewable Resources Board is holding a week of public hearings, it’s a caribou-centric United Nations. Here, different languages, cultures and aims are colliding, while volunteers replenish the buffet table with egg-salad sandwiches. In one corner of the room, the headscarves of female elders form a sea of blue. Male elders in Buddy Holly glasses and ballcaps sit off in another camp. Like national emissaries, political representatives from the Yellowknives Dene and the Kitikmeot region of Nunavut (referred to as “people from the east,” by one Tłi˛cho˛ chief) have come from afar. And within this predominately native crowd are mixed dozens of non-aboriginals – lawyers, government biologists, outfitters, journalists and territorial policy wonks. One outfitter, wearing a Stetson, shares snuff with an elder.
At the back of the room is a translucent plastic booth. Here, a string of interpreters fight a hopeless battle to make everyone understand each other. Working in pairs, they awkwardly switch between English and Tłi˛cho˛. If one misses a word, the other jumps in. Their jumbled translations are broadcast to dozens of headsets that attendees clutch to their ears. When Tłi˛cho˛ government official Bertha Rabesca announces, “I’m going to speak Tłi˛cho˛ now,” there’s a kerfuffle: Several radio batteries have gone dead.
So far, this has been less of a meeting and more of an opportunity for the Tłi˛cho˛ and other aboriginal groups to rebuke the government. When Chief Edward Chocolate of Gameti comes to the microphone, he says that the elders are angry. Workshops were held in four Tłi˛cho˛ communities preparing for these hearings, he says, but the government’s decision to issue a ban has rendered them pointless. “That process was not honoured,” Chocolate says. Later, John B. Zoe, former chief land-claim negotiator for the Tłi˛cho˛, tells the Wek’èezhìi board that the territorial government tends to behave as it has in the past. “Mistrust has always been there and it continues to be there, even today,” Zoe says. “If there’s going to be a management plan, we need to be involved.”
As the meeting continues, several chiefs hold up the Tłi˛cho˛ land-claim as if to ask NWT officials if they’ve forgotten about it. After decades of negotiations, the claim became law in 2005 and was designed to end unilateral decisions by the NWT by formally creating the Tłi˛cho˛ government and allocating it some 39,000 square kilometres of land, called Wek’èezhìi. In that jurisdiction, the Tłi˛cho˛ supposedly rule supreme, with powers almost on par with those of Ottawa. The agreement dictates that decisions on wildlife are to be created by the Wek’èezhìi board, a 50-50 mix of NWT government and Tłi˛cho˛ representatives. Still, the agreement sees the NWT environment minister retaining emergency powers to veto board decisions and the power to make his or her own. Like, say, banning hunting.
A distinction emerges during the hearing. When confronted by problems, people fall back on what they know. For aboriginals, that fallback is tradition. The Tłi˛cho˛, the Yellowknives and other caribou-hunters in the NWT believe they’ve been here since the beginning of time. This history is sewn together with the history of caribou. As Fred Sangris, a former Yellowknives Dene chief, tells the board, “It’s not as if Dene don’t know how to practice management. That’s why the caribou are still here.” According to traditional Dene knowledge, passed down through oral stories, caribou populations are cyclical. It’s felt the herd has always rebounded, and will again.
For most non-aboriginals, though, the fallback is science. And the science presented at the hearing says caribou populations across the North are in sharp decline – and that this decline has no parallels in the past. Anne Gunn, the preeminent biologist on the Bathurst caribou, sits quietly in her sweater and hiking boots on one side of the massive table at the hearing. She’s a calming force, respectful of both ways of knowing, yet confident in her research. “You’ve got strong trends in weather, warming of the winter ranges and possibly hotter and dryer summers,” Gunn says to me. “Those may be accentuating the declines and also linking them across a continental scale.” Then, she says, there’s man. With us it’s all an upward trend – our access to caribou via winter roads, our speed to reach them with bigger snowmachines, our efficiency at harvesting them with powerful rifles, and our presence at hunting camps and mining developments. “Each of these is inconsequential in itself,” she says. “But it looks like they’re starting to add up.”
This, taken with the communication problems and the vastly different worldviews, could make it seem co-management is an impossible goal. But then, what’s this? During the coffee breaks, as people devour those egg-salad sandwiches, something interesting happens in Behchokó˛. People have informal chats. They find common ground; they build relationships and consensus; they work through problems. These 10-minute blips in the spectacle are the most constructive part of it. By accident, this is co-management in action.
Fred Mandeville is not here. “He went duck hunting and got stuck with the weather,” says a receptionist at the territorial government’s Environment & Natural Resources office on the shore of Great Slave Lake in Yellowknife. Mandeville, a renewable resources officer, was supposed to show me the freezer where the caribou that had been seized from Erasmus were being held. But Mandeville misses this appointment, and doesn’t call me back until days later. It’s ironic, really. The NWT’s justification for its ban has always been timeliness.
I console myself by checking out the small Northern zoo in the office – stuffed cougars, lynxes, wolverines and other animals, all frozen in time. The setting is misleading in a way. The officers in this building don’t manage wildlife; they manage people. And as Susan Fleck, director of wildlife with the NWT, says of the caribou debate, “The caribou can take care of themselves.”
So why manage people with heavy-handed hunting bans? Fleck says when the government realized the Bathurst herd was in rapid decline, it started talking to people last July about the coming population estimates, preparing them for emergency measures. But the Wek’èezhìi board ended up delaying meeting until March because of the influx of interest in such measures. With so many people wanting to talk, it couldn’t take action. “That left the minister with a decision to make about what needs to be done to protect this herd in the interim,” Fleck says.
People being people, though, rules that aren’t supported are often ignored. That’s the case not only in the NWT but wherever caribou hunters and government clash. Joe Tetlichi, chair of the Porcupine Caribou Management Board in Whitehorse, says it’s easy to roll into a community and say, “This is what we’re going to do.” But to get people to comply with these decisions – the ultimate goal – you have to help them understand. “If you go in there and you’re going to start putting up graphs and charts and numbers, you’re not going to get a buy-in,” he says. Rather, he maintains, you have to give people the benefit of the doubt. “We have to make them try things they don’t do at first. If that doesn’t work then we have to go the alternative way, which is probably the government way. We always hear the saying that we have aboriginal rights. But if there’s no caribou, we don’t have any aboriginal right to hunt. So, both parties have to come together.”
That isn’t always happening. In the Yukon, the Porcupine caribou have fallen from 200,000 animals in the 1990s to fewer than 100,000 today. Last fall, the Yukon government imposed a hunting ban, ignoring the aboriginal management board’s stance and conservation measures. Several hunters in turn defied the ban. Then the Gwitch’in Tribal Council and Inuvialuit Game Council launched a lawsuit.
Meanwhile, in Labrador, the provincial government imposed restrictions to save the near-extinct Red Wine herd. In November, the Quebec Innu, which have traditionally crossed provincial borders but haven’t concluded their land claim, wore hoodies as they killed about 250 animals while conservation officials watched. The hunt was in protest of a deal between Labrador Innu and the Newfoundland government. One person has been charged.
The confrontation in Labrador highlights the divide between predominately white, southern views about conservation and aboriginal ones. “It just shows how weak the government is on this issue,” Cyril Pelley, former president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Outfitters Association, told The Globe and Mail. “If anybody had done that outside of some Innu group, they would’ve been in jail forever.” Throughout the North, many non-aboriginals express similar frustrations.
This is the difficult balance territorial and provincial governments must strike in a region that’s predominately aboriginal. Dissenting views and defiant actions must be absorbed, while caribou ultimately must be conserved. Because, in the end, that’s Canadian law: Aboriginal hunting rights are enshrined in the constitution but are ultimately limited by conservation. In times of scarcity of resources, the aboriginal hunt will be the last to be restricted – but it will be restricted nonetheless. And while aboriginals may challenge a territory or province’s authority in the courts, if caribou are threatened, lawyers say Ottawa will eventually step into the void.
Ultimately, then, the task of co-management is getting people to buy in to a decision. And if caribou are going to be conserved, it’s only going to happen through collaboration, Gunn says. “It’s going to be everybody, you and me, working towards the same end.”
With governments across the North stepping in because co-management boards haven’t acted swiftly to stem caribou declines, co-management now faces a decisive test, says Don Russell, of CircumArctic. “I’m not saying the top-down approach is necessarily better, but I think the expectation was that with the co-management setups there would be a lot more local control,” Russell says. “Could they manage these caribou crises, if that’s what you want to call them, better than the state itself?”
But Gunn feels the problems aren’t in the model but in its application. “I suspect it’s not so much a failure of co-management as it is a failure of the governments to build capacity and support co-management,” she says. “I think the government appears to have been slow to share its responsibilities with the co-management boards.”
Either way, on the ground, where decisions require people supporting them, some remain unconvinced. George Goulet, a hunter from N’dilo, near Yellowknife, tells me he believes he can still hunt. “I feel I have the right to go out there as need be,” Goulet says. His freezer is nearly empty of caribou – he hasn’t gone hunting in three years. So no matter what, hunting ban or no hunting ban, Goulet says next year, he’s going hunting.
